Kindle 2

In the April 13, 2009 issue of Publishers Weekly I saw a picture that caught my eye. Protestors with signs saying, "Equal access. It’s the law." And "Don’t disable the Kindle" and "Why don’t authors want to be heard?" Next to the picture is a news brief about the Kindle. A group of approximately 200 people protested in front of the Authors Guild headquarters in New York City. These protestors were people with print disabilities – physical impairments that restrict their ability to read print – and they were protesting against the Authors Guild attempt to disable the Kindle 2’s text-to-speech function.

While I have been thinking of intellectual freedom in terms of books and the Internet, this is something I had not considered. Most of the press about the Kindle that I’ve seen has been more about the copyright issues with the authors and publishers. I am very fortunate not to have a print disability, and this disagreement with the Authors Guild is very understandable. At the library where I am employed we have books on CD that patrons with print disabilities can use. We have not started using e-books yet, though I think that is coming soon. And if various authors do not want to have their books in other formats, I could see that they have the right to do that on an author-by-author or format-by-format basis. But for this Guild to request that a company disable its text-to-print function on its entire stock of Kindles which is part of the product's very reason for existing? I agree with the protestors that that is denying equal access. It is too broad a denial. A new avenue of intellectual freedom issues is here to address.

Federal Bureau of Prisons

In the May 2009 Focus on Indiana Libraries is an article entitled, "Not Yet Hot Off the Press" by Doug Archer, ILF & ALA Intellectual Freedom Chair. He lists two potentially high impact items that have not yet shown up in the national media. I'm just going to address one of them, and that is the recently proposed regulation from the Federal Bureau of Prisons which would scrap the "Standard Prison Chapel Library Project" and replace that with a system that involves the selection of approved religious books by a "quasi-secret" government panel with an item by item rejection system administered by prison officials. The ACLU is opposing these new rules because it violates statutory and constitutional requirements and statutory protections for the free exercise of religion among other things. More pertinent to our class is the ACLU's objection that the proposed rules fail to specify a decisionmaker and raises the specter of censorship by "low-level" officials.

My reaction to this is mixed. I on theoretical grounds have to agree with the ACLU that prisoners do not give up all constitutional protections once incarcerated, and letting local prison officials make decisions on which books can be read and which cannot introduces more bias than I like to think about. I was employed with the Indiana DOC for seven years as a substance abuse counselor. I saw abuse coming from both sides. I saw AA big books carved out so that drugs could be smuggled in them. It was commonly known that religious services at one institution where I worked were a meeting and trading place for drugs. I also saw authorities exercise unnecessary authority and restrictions and abuse just because they could. However, what about those offenders (no longer called inmates or prisoners) who truly just want to educate themselves and are denied religious books based on stereotypes about a particular religion? I agree with Doug Archer that the Federal Bureau of Prisons need to come up with a better plan, specifically about who the decision-makers will be regarding selection of religious materials. I also understand that those incarcerated have rightfully lost some rights and should not get to have free reign over what they select to read.

At last

This is just a test blog. I seemed to have difficulty, not with setting up the blog account, but actually finding how to make a first entry! I had forgotten to validate via my email. I look forward to blogging things of more substance later.